Women in Hong Kong looking for romance can’t turn to the latest government statistics for inspiration. According to official figures, the city’s gender imbalance is currently the worst on record: Hong Kong’s sex ratio is 876 men for every 1,000 women.

One in five women born today in Hong Kong can expect to remain single for the rest of their lives, says Paul Yip, a demographer at the University of Hong Kong. “And the situation will get worse,” he says. “You can see already that the number of singletons in Hong Kong has gone up.” In 2011, there were 209,000 women living alone in Hong Kong, a figure that’s more than doubled since 1996.

A number of dating agencies have lately sprung up to service Hong Kong’s lonely female hearts, alternately offering overseas matchmaking trips and high-priced dinner parties promising to help Hong Kong women meet eligible foreigners. The city’s gender imbalance also inspired the launch of one recent reality TV show, “Bride Wannabes,” which followed a group of 30-something Hong Kong women on their quest to find a husband, stopping at cosmetic surgery clinics and submitting to various coaching from dating ‘experts’ along the way.

Today, Hong Kong’s sex ratio is the most skewed the city’s clocked since it was first officially recorded in 1961, when the number of men in Hong Kong slightly eclipsed the number of women. In recent years, though, the sex ratio has flipped, as rising numbers of Hong Kong men have pursued marriages across the border in mainland China, where women are seen as more pliant and less choosy than their Hong Kong counterparts. An influx of mostly female domestic helpers from the Philippines and Indonesia—there are currently some 300,000 in town—has also helped deepen the city’s gender imbalance. When domestic helpers are removed from the calculation, Hong Kong’s sex ratio stands at a more balanced (if still lopsided) 948 men per 1,000 women.

By contrast, mainland China is home to many more men than women: there, the UN reports, the sex ratio is 108 men per 100 women, thanks to the one-child policy and a traditional preference for sons. A number of enterprising dating companies have tried to capitalize on this imbalance—for example, by setting up Hong Kong women with mainland men.

According to the city’s deputy commissioner for census and statistics, Hong Kong’s sex ratio will likely grow more exaggerated in the coming decades, widening to 788 men per 1000 women by 2026 and 712 per 1000 women by 2041.

Given how well-educated and financially independent many of them are, Hong Kong women are famously “selective and very picky” when it comes to choosing a partner, says Mr. Yip. Still, he says, high rates of singlehood are ultimately about a shortage of men.

“Even if they lower their standards,” he says of Hong Kong women, “many still won’t find husbands.”

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